Are you tired of competing in the low-price marketing game? We don’t blame you! Not only is competing on price a race to the bottom, where you and other dealers in your market are fighting over a few pennies rattling around in the bottom of the bucket, but it’s boring.
Marketing is supposed to help you stand out. It should give customers a reason to choose you over anyone else, but if your ads look the same as all of your competitors, how can you hope to make that happen.
Yet another reason why you need to get out of the low-price game. Last time we showed you how targeting can help you create extreme customer attraction momentum without the slightest mention of price. Today, we’ll examine the other two component methods—positioning and offers.
Positioning
Most dealership marketing effectively positions the dealership as a product-oriented business. Pictures of cars, lists of features and prices. But product-oriented messages will do very little to attract the Sleeping Buyers.
Instead, the “No Price” method advocates positioning the dealer (a person) and the dealership as solutions-oriented, with a focus on solving problems and offering helpful advice, rather than pushing a product. This positioning technique significantly lowers buyer anxiety and resistance and helps hasten the building of trust and rapport.
Common elements of this kind of positioning are a unique and compelling story about the dealer and the dealership, an explanation of why the dealer does what he or she does, a book or special reports or white papers offered by the dealer, a guarantee of providing a solutions-oriented experience, customer testimonials about their experience and about the solutions-oriented nature of the dealership. Essentially, the “No Price” method causes you to sell cars by building trust, rather than by lowering price. This approach helps lessen buyer anxiety, and since fear and anxiety are significant reasons buyers are staying out of the market, it makes sense why this is so effective.
Offers
Most dealership marketing features prices and price-related offers like low payments, rebates or special incentives. Unfortunately, price-related offers do little in the way of attracting non-intenders.
The “No Price” method requires using offers that address and offer to solve the specific problems customers (non-intenders) have. Dealers have found that switching from a price-related offer to a solutions-related offer in their current advertising alone will yield a noticeable result. As an added benefit, the same offers that attract non-intenders are also extremely appealing to in-market shoppers and have proven to be effective alternatives to price-oriented offers.
The conclusion is that price is not the only competitive advantage available to dealers anymore. While the number of intender shoppers stays consistently small, the number of Sleeping Buyers grows or stays high. All indications point to the “No Price” method as a powerful tool available to dealers for years to come, which can help dealers stop fighting with other dealers over the same few customers and create their own crop of dedicated and enthusiastic buyers using the natural customer attraction power of targeting, positioning, and offers.